Transfixing with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing

He feels the inmost: never felt the less
Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn
For burning next reflectors of blue steel,
That he should be the colder for his place
'Twixt two incessant fires,-his personal life's,
And that intense refraction which burns back
Perpetually against him from the round
Of crystal conscience he was born into
If artist-born? O sorrowful great gift
Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,

When one life has been found enough for pain!" This is, we have little doubt, a very truthful, as well as very forcible, description of her own experience as a poet; but it is far from being a true description of all poets, or at least of the whole function of any complete poet. No man, from the riches of his own life and actually experienced feelings, could have written Lear and Hamlet. Even in lyrical poetry, greater poems have been written from feelings assumed by the imagination than from real ones. Burns, more than most poets, found the sources of his poetry within his own heart; yet "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled" is greater than even "Thou lingering star with lessening ray." But Mrs. Browning has little, if any, of this power of assuming a temporary sympathy by virtue of the imagination alone; and she is still more destitute of another, closely allied to it, the capacity of speaking from a point of view not one's own. This capacity is the basis of dramatic power; and therefore of dramatic power Mrs. Browning has not even the rudiments. Much pure gold issues from her treasury; but she coins it all, and stamps it with her own image. Her poetry is isolated and sedentary; not isolated in its sympathies, which are as warm and broad and tender as poet's need to be; but her voice comes as the voice of one who has always dwelt apart, and felt for men and admired Nature at a distance,

rather than walked familiarly in the common pathways. Hence, as she does not go down among that mass of men who read her, they must come up to her to understand. Proportioned to the absence of mobile capacity in herself is the demand she makes on that of her readers. They must assume her standing-place, and look on her work from her own point of view, if they would comprehend her meanings. Her very greatness makes this difficult; it is not all minds which can adapt themselves to her intellectual focus. Moreover, partly a want of experience, which shows in her writings, partly her own constitution, throw her back a good deal on the facts of her own inner life; and thus there is often a difficult subject-matter as well as a difficult treatment.

This want of intimacy, if we may so call it, with the outward world, is probably at the bottom of a peculiar defectiveness in the expressional matter of Mrs. Browning's poetry. We have before spoken of a discordance between the whole imaginative temper and the matter; but besides this, there is often an utter want of harmony between the matter in hand and the simile under which it is represented to us the likeness may be true enough, forcible, and cogent; but it carries with it a distracting set of associations, and makes a sudden discord, to which Mrs. Browning seems to be insensible. Our meaning will be made clear, and our criticism best justified, by quoting some of the most marked instances of this defect. In her last poem she has the following passage to express and illustrate a poet's rendering of his age:

“Never flinch,

But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,

The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say,
'Behold,―behold the paps we all have sucked!""

The contrast is almost savage. Burning lava and a

woman's breast! and concentrated in the latter the fullest ideas of life. It is absolute pain to read it. No man could have written it; for, independently of its cruelty, there is a tinge in it of a sort of forward familiarity, with which Mrs. Browning sometimes, and never without uneasiness to her readers, touches upon things which the instinct of the other sex prevents them, when undebased, from approaching without reverence and tenderness.

A little further on we have some lines on which commentary is hopeless; we only ask for their perusal, and for a deliberate consideration of the varied metaphors :

""Tis true the stage requires obsequiousness
To this or that convention; 'exit' here

And 'enter' there; the points for clapping, fixed,
Like Jacob's white-peeled rods before the rams;
And all the close-curled imagery clipped

In manner of their fleece at shearing-time.
Forget to prick the galleries to the heart
Precisely at the fourth act,-culminate

Our five pyramidal acts with one act more,—
We're lost so!"

When you are describing the shifty life of a degraded drunken vagrant, is it fitting to embody in this exquisite language his occasional help in driving Welsh ponies?

"Her father earned his life by random jobs
Despised by steadier workmen-keeping swine
On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on
The harvest at wet seasons,-or, at need,
Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a drove
Of startled horses plunged into the mist
Below the mountain-road, and sowed the wind
With wandering neighings. In between the gaps
Of such irregular work, he drank and slept,

And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,
She could not buy more drink.”

Sometimes the undiscriminating lavishness with which the imagery is poured forth results in the direst confusion; as in the following lines, where we are represented

as shut up with wild-beasts inside a key (for it is the natural world we are shut up in), whose wards, moreover, we have filled with clay :

"Thus it is,'

I sighed. And he resumed with mournful face.
'Beginning so, and filling up with clay
The wards of this great key, the natural world,
And fumbling vainly therefore at the lock
Of the spiritual,—we feel ourselves shut in
With all the wild-beast roar of struggling life,
The terrors and compunctions of our souls,
As saints with lions,-we who are not saints,
• And have no heavenly lordship in our stare
To awe them backward!""

It is a common error of Mrs. Browning's to carry her image just one step too far, and thus to raise it out of its proper subordination, and give it an undue importance; so that, instead of being subdued and moulded to the tone of the matter, it lifts its strong and rugged head, and insists on an independent recognition. For instance, when she speaks of her father's Elzevirs, written over with his faded notes:

66

— conferenda hæc cum his— Corruptè citat-lege potiùs,

And so on, in the scholar's regal way

Of giving judgment on the parts of speech,
As if he sate on all twelve thrones up-piled,
Arraigning Israel.”

Here the single word "regal" conveys all that is wanted with abundantly ample force and distinctness; and the two last lines serve only to distract us, by introducing a misplaced definiteness and a set of ideas on a new scale too large for the thought.

It would be absurd, of course, to say that Mrs. Browning is destitute of an insight into or a sense of the true harmonious relations of things, for without this she could not be a poet; and few poets surpass her in that felicitous command over the hidden and mysterious powers of words

and their associations, which is of the very essence of the poet's art; but she wants the negative sense which shrinks from a discord. Probably an intense intellectual activity has something to do with this: her mind moves in starts; one idea occupies her for a moment; she holds it up in the vivid light of her imagination, throws it down, and seizes another. Her intellect is too fertile in proportion to her artistic instincts; and her thoughts and fancies bristle up over her work "like quills upon the fretful porcupine. It is a great fault in her poetry, that it wants the fine connecting links by which parts are smoothed into a whole. Rapid and sudden transitions may, of course, often be effective and desirable; but Mrs. Browning's poetry is apt to be broken up by a constant series of small disconnections; her carriage has no springs; and though the main course of the poem and the thought is consecutive, the reader is sadly jolted by the way.

Sometimes Mrs. Browning's high-wrought metaphors give the impression of a vice which she is bound by all the indisputable greatness of her gifts not to fall into,— that of straining for effect from mere startling force of diction, instead of seeking in simplicity the truest expression, that meretricious display of matterless largemouthedness, for which much modern poetry is commended. Of a conscious acquiescence in this sort of untruthfulness,—for it is of the nature of untruthfulness, -no one who has read and knows the poetry of Mrs. Browning will for a moment accuse her; but she may be fairly charged with having rather spurred on, when she should have curbed, her naturally daring and vehement imagination. And she loses by it; for just as a mounted horse can always overtake an unmounted one, so power is greater and more effective when under the control of a higher power. It leads her astray too sometimes. Real life is higher and more responsible than any art, and no gain of force in imagery can justify the least failing in religious reverence. But Mrs. Browning has accustomed